Ohio Historical Society check-off aids 11 projects

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Eleven projects are benefiting from about $114,000 collected in the first year of a new state income-tax check-off for the Ohio Historical Society.

The projects include improving and documenting several historic sites, digitizing atlases and rare color film footage and producing a re-enactment of the first anti-slavery convention in Ohio.

The historical society says nearly 17,000 Ohioans contributed last year to the History Fund for the 2011 tax year. Those contributions fund a competitive grant program.

"It is proving to be a very popular and worthy program that helps history-related organizations across Ohio fund the projects that are meaningful to their communities," the society's executive director, Burt Logan, said in a statement.

The 11 recipients were chosen from 64 applications that sought a total of $891,000, far more than was available.

Five recipients were awarded grants of $15,000 each. Among them are the Dennison Railroad Depot, a National Historic Landmark that will move two of its museums, and a Society of Friends site in southwest Ohio that will add restrooms so it can open to the public, the historical society said. A group in Elyria is using its grant to support a documentary about Ohioan Emma Gatewood and her hikes of the Appalachian Trail in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History got nearly $13,000 for a pilot project focused on inexpensively documenting prehistoric Native American archaeological sites in the eastern Lake Erie basin.

The Granville Historical Society in central Ohio received about $6,000 for a re-enactment of the 1836 anti-slavery convention in Granville through a partnership with area schools.

Other projects focus on digitizing information to better preserve and share it. A library system in Middletown will use about $2,000 to digitize a few local atlases, and the Union County Historical Society got $3,300 to digitize rare color film of Ohio in 1938, including small-town life, the state fair and Ohio State football games.

Other grants went to groups in Cleveland, New Concord, Springfield and Zanesville.